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Secrets of the Third Reich
Part II
"He had one already off of the drawing board and flying and it was
capable of 1200 miles an hour. Vertical take-off, 90° changes, much
like a helicopter, and of course was far superior to anything the
Allies powers had at that time. Secondly they knew he had another
craft about to be up and going it was capable of doing 2500 miles
per hours, which was double the original. Not only did it have the
characteristics of the original craft, but it also had a laser
weapon aboard it which capable of penetrating four inches of armour.
Needless to say that really spooked the allied forces into making a
redemptive attempt against him and bringing him … into a state of
capitulation." (6)
Bulgarian Physicist Vladimir Terziski also wrote the following about
these Nazi UFOs.
"According to Renato Vesco … Germany was sharing a
great deal of the advances in weaponry with their allies the
Italians during the war. At the Fiat experimental facility at Lake
La Garda, a facility that fittingly bore the name of Air Marshall
Hermann Goering, the Italians were experimenting with numerous
advanced weapons, rockets and airplanes, created in Germany. In a
similar fashion, the Germans kept a close contact with the Japanese
military establishment and were supplying it with many advanced
weapons. I have discovered for example a photo of a copy of the
manned version of the V-1 – the Reichenberg – produced in Japan by
Mitsubishi. The best fighter in the world, the push-pull twin
propeller Dornier-335 was duplicated at the Kawashima works."
This appears to be the extent of information that can be verified to
a degree. However there is much more that ‘fits’ within the known
facts, but cannot be verified independently and therefore may well
be fiction portrayed as fact. That said, much of the following
information does flow with the themes explored further in the
subsequent chapters of this book.
Claims have also been made that Nazi Occult societies were involved
in the development of such unconventional saucer craft. One such,
the ‘Vril Society’ was allegedly ‘channelling’ messages from an
alien civilization in the Aldebaran solar system and planned to
develop a craft that could make physical contact with the
civilization there. This may or may not be true; but there was
certainly a high level of occult activity in mid-Europe at that
time, and no doubt organizations did exist then with unconventional
beliefs just as they do today.
Whatever the truth of this, by 1934 the Vril Society had apparently
developed its first UFO shaped aircraft, known as the Vril 1, which
was propelled by an anti-gravity effect. (This was the same year as
Viktor Schauberger discussed his flying disk
 ideas with
Hitler.)
The society then allegedly went on to develop this craft, and later
- and again allegedly - produced the RFC-2. This craft was
apparently 16 feet long and fitted with an improved propulsion
system and for the first time, magnetic impulse steering.
Interestingly, when in flight, it reportedly produced colour effects
normally associated with UFOs.
Yet the RFC-2 was largely ignored with only the SS showing an
interest in
the Vril Society’s work. An inner
organization of the SS
then set up its own SSE-4 department to develop new alternative
technologies to ensure Germany no longer had to be dependent on
external sources of energy and it began work on its own version of
the RFC or Vril.
By 1939 the SS had produced the RFC-5, which it called the Haunebu
1 (click image right). In August 1939 the machine made its maiden flight and proved its
viability, being more than 65 foot in diameter and offering
considerable storage space. By the end of 1940 the RFC- 2 (Haunebu
II - click image left) had entered service as a reconnaissance aircraft and there is
certainly photographic evidence to support this, for example an
RFC-2 was photographed near Antarctica in 1940 (see next chapter.)
It should be noted that there is scant corroborative and
historically verifiable information to support these claims, however
the design of the Haunebu II should be noted for future reference.
Whatever their exact nature, it appears confirmed that a range of
alternative design aircraft were by now either on the drawing board,
hovering above the ground, or crashing into it. Some of these
designs proved viable and successes were being reported. On 17th
April 1945 Miethe was able to advise Hitler that the V-7 had been
tested in the skies above the Baltic. This particular craft was a
supersonic helicopter fitted with 12 BMW Turbo aggregate engines.
During its first test it reached an altitude of 78000feet and then
80000 feet on its second test. Miethe reported that the new craft
 could be powered by unconventional energy sources in principle.
However these new technologies were coming on-line too late, for the
war was already being lost and won.
Within months the Allies and Russians had poured into central
Europe, Hitler was dead and the war apparently over.
And as soon as the war was over, ghost rockets started appearing
over Scandinavia and within two years ‘flying saucers’ were being
reported wholesale over mainland
 United States.
It was no co-incidence.
After the end of the war in 1945, Russian and American intelligence
teams began a hunt to track down this perceived military and
scientific booty of the advanced German technology. Following the
discovery of particle/laser beam weaponry in German military bases,
the US War Department decided that the US must not only control this
technology, but also the scientists who had helped develop it "to
ensure that [America] takes full advantage of those significant
developments which are deemed vital to our national security."
It
therefore launched a project to bring these personnel to the United
States. Whilst initially publicized the nature, extent and secrecy
of the project, later termed ‘Operation Paperclip’ remained
classified until 1973.
The thinking behind Paperclip was exemplified in a letter Major
General Hugh Knerr, Deputy Commanding General for Administration of
US Strategic Forces in Europe, wrote to Lieutenant General Carl Spatz in March 1945:
"Occupation of German scientific and industrial
establishments has revealed the fact that we have been alarmingly
backward in many fields of research, if we do not take this
opportunity to seize apparatus and the brains that developed it and
put this combination back to work promptly, we will remain several
years behind while we attempt to cover a field already exploited."
There was however, one slight problem: It was illegal, for US law
explicitly prohibited Nazi officials from immigrating to America,
and as many as three-quarters of the scientists in question were
allegedly committed Nazis. (Indeed as at least 1600 scientists and
their dependants were taken to America under Operation Paperclip and
its successor projects, it could
 hardly avoid including Nazis.)
However President Truman (right) decided that the national interest
was paramount and that America needed the German scientists to work
on America’s behalf. In fairness to Truman, he expressly ordered
that anyone found to "have been a member of the Nazi party and more
than a nominal participant in its activities, or an active supporter
of Nazism or militarism" must be excluded from the operation.
Operation Paperclip was carried out by the Joint Intelligence
Objectives Agency (JIOA) and had two aims:
-
Firstly, to exploit
German Scientists for American research by rounding up Nazi
scientists and taking them to America
-
Secondly, to deny these
intellectual resources to the Soviet Union
(7).
(The name ‘Operation
Paperclip’ derived from the fact that those individuals selected to
go to the United States were distinguished by paperclips on their
files joining their scientific papers with regular immigration
forms.(8))
The Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA) then conducted
background investigations on the identified scientists, and in
February 1947 the Director of the JIOA, Navy Captain Bosquet Wev,
submitted the first set of dossiers to the State and Justice
Departments for review.
These dossiers, though, proved to be damning, with Samuel Klaus, the
State Department’s representative on the JOIA Board claiming that
all the scientists in the first batch were ‘ardent Nazis’. The visa
requests were consequently denied. Wev already knew those proposed
had Nazi backgrounds this for in a memo dated 27th April 1948 to the
Pentagon’s Director of Intelligence, he wrote
"Security investigations conducted
by the military have disclosed the fact that the majority of
German scientists were members of either the Nazi Party or one
or more of its affiliates." (9)
Wev was furious and he fired off a memo to the State Department in
March 1948 warning that
"the best interests of the United States
have been subjugated to the efforts expended in ‘beating a dead Nazi
horse’" (10).
The following month, 27th April 1948, Wev again wrote to his
superiors concerned about the
 delays in approving the German
scientists. He stated
"In light of the situation existing
in Europe today, it is conceivable that continued delay and
opposition to the immigration of these scientists could result
in their eventually falling into then hands of the Russians who
would then gain the valuable information and ability possessed
by these men. Such an eventuality could have a most serious and
adverse effect on the national Security of the United States."
(11)
By this time the Nazi Intelligence leader,
Reinhard Gehlen had met
with the future CIA Director (26th February 1953 – 29th November
1961), Allen Dulles (left), and they had hit it off.
Gehlen was a
master spy for the Nazis and had infiltrated Russia with his vast
intelligence network. (In 1942 the future CIA Director Dulles had
moved to Bern, Switzerland, as Head of Office of Strategic Services
to negotiate with some Nazi leaders who were already convinced they
were going to lose WWII and wanted a deal with the US about a
possible future war with the USSR.) Dulles was not above pursuing
his own agenda with the Nazis, for he had worked with many of them
before the war; as a prominent New York lawyer (1926-1942 and again
from 1946 to 1950)
When Gehlen surrendered to the US, he was taken to Fort Hunt,
Virginia, where he and the US Army reached an agreement: his
intelligence unit would work for and be funded by the US until a new
German Government came into power. In the meantime, should he find a
conflict between the interests of Germany and the US, he could
consider German interests first (12).
For almost ten years the ‘Gehlen Org’ as it became to be known, operated safely within the
CIA and was virtually the CIA’s only source of intelligence on
Eastern Europe. Then in 1955 it evolved into the BND (the German
equivalent of the CIA) and continued to co-operate with its US
counterparts.
The scientists immigration problem was then side-stepped with the
dossiers being ‘cleansed’ of incriminating evidence and, as
promised, Allen Dulles delivered Gehlen Org, the Nazi Intelligence
Unit, to the CIA, which later opened many umbrella projects based on
earlier Nazi research.
Operation Paperclip also had a part to play in events at Maury
Island. Washington State, itself, was the location of several
aerospace defense contractors, which were benefiting from the then
secret Paperclip Operation. It was also the location of sightings in
1947 of a number of aircraft that looked suspiciously like some that
had been seen on Nazi drawing boards and in the skies above Europe
towards the end of the war.
The officers who attended the Maury Island incident, Davidson and
Brown belonged to G-2: It was G-2’s responsibility to ensure
Operation Paperclip was kept as a covert activity and provide the
necessary security to achieve this. Another function of G-2 was the
surveillance of anyone whose activities put Paperclip security at
risk. That they were on their way to Wright-Patterson AFB with the
objects Crisman had given them, was entirely logical – Wright
Patterson (then Wright-Field) was the major research and development
centre where many of the Nazi scientists had been taken to continue
their work.
One of the most prominent of the Paperclip physicians was Hubertus Strughold, later known as the ‘father of space medicine’ and after
whom the Aeromedical Library at the USAF School of Aerospace
medicine was named in 1977. His April 1947 intelligence report
stated,
"[H]is successful career under
Hitler would seem to indicate that he must be in full
accord with Hitler." However he was admitted under Operation
Paperclip on the grounds that he was "not an ardent Nazi."
(13)
Other Nazis included Klaus Barbie, the so-called ‘Butcher of Lyon’,
Otto von Bolschwing, infamous for his holocaust activities and the
SS Colonel, Otto Skorzeny (14). However the cleansing of the files
did not always stand up to the scrutiny of time. In 1984, Arthur
Rudolph, who, in 1969 had been awarded NASA’s Distinguished Service
Award, left the country rather than face charges as a Nazi war
criminal.
Another former alleged Nazi was Wernher Von Braun. Born on 23rd
March 1912, von Braun became one of the world’s first and foremost
rocket engineers and a leading authority on space travel. Born the
son of Prussian aristocrats Baron Magnus and Baroness Emmy von
Braun, the young Wernher (right) read Hermann Oberth’s ‘By Rocket
into Planetary Space’ (De Rakete zu den Planetenaumen), and his new
interest led him to later enroll at the Berlin Institute of
Technology in 1930. In 1932 he received his bachelor’s degree in
mechanical engineering and he was then offered a grant to conduct
and develop
 scientific investigations on liquid-fuelled rocket
engines (15). Von Braun’s rocket experiments were tested at the
Kummersdorf Proving Grounds, sixty miles south of Berlin, between
1932 and 1937.
Kummersdorf was the launch site of two German V-2 rockets in 1934
(16). After their launch, Braun started work on a jet-assisted take
off vehicle for heavy bombers and all-rocket fighters
(17) however Kummersdorf was too small for this task, and so
von Braun relocated
to Peenemunde on the Baltic Coast where he became director from
1937-1945. This site was then equipped with laboratories and
industrial facilities to facilitate the development, production and
testing of the German,
It was this V-2 rocket that inflicted such
heavy damage on England during the war.
Von Braun was not a
reluctant Nazi. Indeed,
"he joined the National Socialist Aviation
Corps, getting his pilot’s license in 1933, the DAF trade
organization, a hunting organization associated with the Nazis, the
air raid protection investigation, and the SS horseback riding
school (19)."
Von Braun’s own admissions in US Army records further
show that he was a former SS Major who frequently visited the
underground rocket factory where 25,000 prisoners from the
concentration camp Dora had died. According to the former executive
producer of CNN’s investigative unit, Linda Hunt, von Braun attended
a meeting that discussed rounding up of citizens off the streets of
France to be taken to Dora.
As the war entered its dying throws in 1945, von Braun ordered two
men to find an abandoned mine in the Harz Mountains to hide data
about the V-2s. Several large boxes were then placed in a discovered
cave and von Braun sent his younger brother Magnus off on a bicycle
he had borrowed from a local innkeeper to look for Allies to whom
they could surrender.
Von Braun and his scientific staff duly
surrendered to the US Army whilst most of the production engineers
were taken prisoner by the Soviets
(20).
After entering America as part of Project Paperclip, on a pay of $6
a day plus lodging in a military installation, Braun worked on
guided missiles for the US Army. He returned to Bavaria in 1948 to
marry his second cousin and he later served as Technical Director
then later Chief of the Guided Missile Development Division of
Redstone Arsenal from 1950 to 1956 whilst living in Huntsville,
Alabama (21). Von Braun was later appointed Director of Development
Operations Division of the Army Missile Agency, which developed the
Jupiter-C rocket that was to successfully launch the western’s
hemisphere’s first satellite, ‘Explorer-I’ on 31st January 1958,
auguring the birth of the American Space Programme
(22).
Two years later von Braun and his team were transferred to NASA’s
Marshall Space Flight Centre where he served as Director from July
1960 to February 1970. During the 1950s and 60s he achieved an
almost celebrity status as one of Walt
 Disney’s experts on the
‘World of Tomorrow’. In 1970 he became NASA’s associate
administrator and without him, it is unlikely that the organization
would ever have put man on the Moon.
Over a course of twenty years, von Braun received approximately 25
honorary degrees and he accepted many other awards and medals,
presented to him from small cities, to NASA and even the President.
(Right - Von Braun with President
Kennedy.)
His dossier was apparently rewritten so he didn’t appear an
enthusiastic (alleged) Nazi and he attempted to play down his real
Nazi involvement by claiming
"In 1939 [sic] I was officially
demanded to join the National Socialist Party. At this time I was
already Technical Director at Peenemünde … The technical work had …
attracted attention at higher and higher levels. Thus, my refusal to
join the party would have meant that I would have to abandon the
work of my life. My membership in the party did not include any
political activity (23)."
However, von Braun’s claim was simply untrue, for other scientists
successfully used an old rule of the Weimar Republic that
 was still
in use, forcing anyone in the military to abstain from political
affiliation.
Wernher von Braun’s mentor, Hermann Oberth also entered the US after
the war under Operation Paperclip. Born 25th June 1894 in the
Transylvanian town of Hermannstadt, Oberth (left with von Braun) is
widely recognized as the founding father of modern rocketry, having
published the paper in 1923 that was to so inspire von Braun, ‘Die Rakete zu den Planetenraumen’ (By Rocket into Planetary Space.) This
was followed by a longer version (429 pages) in 1929 that was
internationally regarded as a work of tremendous scientific
importance.
When in his thirties, Oberth took Wernher von Braun (who
affectionately referred to Oberth as his ‘teacher’) on as an
assistant, and they worked together at Peenemunde developing the V2
rocket. After entering the US at the end of the war along with the
remaining 100 V2 rockets and components, Oberth again worked with
Von Braun as the entire Peenemunde team was re-assembled at the
White Sands Proving Grounds. Oberth and Von Braun continued their
work and it was a later development of the same V2 rocket which had
inflicted so much damage on Northern Europe that was eventually to
propel the first American into space in the Saturn V rocket.
Oberth
retired three years after entering the US and returned to Germany
where he headed us the Oberth Commission for the German Government
into the UFO phenomenon.
References:
(6) Ibid
(7) Memorandum to Members of the Advisory Committee on Human
Radiation Experiments 5th April 1995, from Advisory Committee Staff
‘Post World War II Recruitment of German Scientists – Operation
Paperclip’
(8) Stuhlinger, Ernest and Ordway, Frederick III, ‘Wernher von
Braun: Crusader for Space’ p. 67 Kreiger Publishing Company, Florida
1994.
(9) Memorandum to Members of the Advisory Committee on Human
Radiation Experiments 5th April 1995, from Advisory Committee Staff
‘Post World War II Recruitment of German Scientists – Operation
Paperclip’
(10) Ibid.
(11) Ibid.
(12) Zapezauer, Mark ‘The CIA’s Greatest Hits’
(13) Memorandum to Members of the Advisory Committee on Human
Radiation Experiments 5th April 1995, from Advisory Committee Staff
‘Post World War II Recruitment of German Scientists – Operation
Paperclip’
(14) Ibid.
(15) Buckbee, Edward O., ‘Biographical Data: Wernher von Braun’
Alabama Space and Rocket Centre, 1983.
(16) Stuhlinger, Ernest and Ordway, Frederick III, ‘Wernher von
Braun: Crusader for Space’ p.15, Kreiger Publishing Company, Florida
1994.
(17) Bergaust, Erik, ‘Wernher von Braun’ pp51-52, National Space
Institute, Washington DC, 1978.
(18) Dooling, David, ‘Academic American Encyclopaedia’ p. 134
Grolier Inc 1993.
(19) Donefer, Charles, ‘Wernher von Braun: National Hero or Enemy to
the World?’ 1996
(20) Ibid p. 134
(21) Buckbee, Edward O., ‘Biographical Data: Wernher von Braun’ p. 2
Alabama Space and Rocket Centre, 1983.
(22) Ibid p. 3
(23) DeVorkin, David H., ‘Science With A Vengeance: How the Military
Created the US Space Sciences After World War II’ p. 26, Springer-Verlag,
New York 1992.
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